DazStudio from Daz Productions
When I first started creating my own 3-D Models, I found the most popular online resources — Morph Manager, UV Mapper Pro, and Cr2Editor — are all PC-Only. With patience and perseverance I discovered some alternatives to these programs that work on the Mac!
Shade is an excellent tool for building 3-D Models from scratch that is produced by E-Frontier and is available for both the Mac and the PC. 3-D objects are designed in Shade using splines, curves that can be re-shaped by moving a small set of control points; this is the same method used to create shapes in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. In building my own models, I learned that Shade has UV Mapping capabilities equivalent to UV Mapper Pro. Although Shade has a steep learning curve, it is well worth the time and monetary investment.
DAZStudio created by DAZ Productions is quickly becoming a powerful alternative to Poser. The cost of entry is much less than Poser (DAZStudio is free) although it lacks some of the capabilities of Poser. There are many plug-ins available, some free and some for sale, that increase its functionality to the level of Poser. One very useful free plug-in to get for DAZStudio is Inj / Rem Export, a tool for creating Morph Injection files.
Xcode, Apple’s Development Program, is available on the OS X installer disc. This is the closest thing to a CR2 Editor available for the Mac. XCode won’t add extra-formating to a file unlike TextEdit. It is a powerful tool but it seems like a waste to use it for something as trivial as editing a text file.
